Jonathan Bilyk News

The Illinois Supreme Court says an Illinois privacy law doesn’t require plaintiffs to prove they were actually harmed before suing businesses and others who scan and store their fingerprints or other so-called biometric identifiers. And the decision will give a green light to dozens of class action lawsuits already pending against businesses of all sizes in the state’s courts, with even more likely to follow.

A federal appeals panel in Chicago has rejected the request by a group of home caregivers for a new hearing to reconsider the courts’ prior decisions denying them the opportunity to bring a class action to recover nearly $32 million they accuse a union of unconstitutionally taking from them under a state law invalidated by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Powerful Chicago Ald. Ed Burke was indicted Thursday on a charge of attempting to shake down the owner of a Chicago fast food restaurant seeking to renovate their establishment. And at the center of the charge stands Burke's law firm, which has built a huge business specializing in appealing property tax assessments.

Saying the plaintiffs bringing the action must show how they were actually harmed, a Chicago federal judge has closed the window on a class action lawsuit accusing Google of violating an Illinois privacy law by automatically creating and storing face scans of people in photos uploaded to its Google Photos service.

The Illinois Attorney General's Office and DuPage County State's Attorney have partnered to sue Sterigenics over its alleged emissions of ethylene oxide. However, the state lawsuit has come despite no contention from anyone that Sterigenics violated the terms of its permit, issued by the state. Some worry about the message such a 'bizarre' course of action by the state may send to its businesses, many of whom have similar permits of their own.

Illinois Supreme Court justices appeared to take a dim view of assertions by a lawyer for Six Flags that a mother can't sue the theme park operator after the company required him to scan his fingerprints to use his park season pass, even though she had not provided consent.

Saying the trend carries substantial costs for investors and the entire economy, a new report is calling for reforms to tamp down on the growing surge in the number of so-called securities class action lawsuits filed against companies over mergers, acquisitions or stock price drops - a phenomenon the report author called a "litigation racket."

Across the U.S., Americans pay hefty costs for lawsuits, with the price tag stretching from the courthouses to the most basic levels of American life, adding thousands of dollars each year to Americans’ household budget costs, according to a new study of tort litigation costs.

Saying customers have an obligation to read and understand the terms of their insurance policies, the Illinois state Supreme Court has rejected the try by a couple to make their American Family Insurance agent pay for providing them with a policy that didn’t protect them against a defamation lawsuit, even though they had specifically asked the agent to obtain that coverage for them.

Saying the Illinois gubernatorial frontrunner’s campaign has routinely “herded” and “marginalized” its workers of color, a group of African American and Latino workers for Illinois Democratic gubernatorial nominee JB Pritzker has sued Pritzker’s campaign organization for discrimination and harassment.

A new legislative proposal would force real estate lawyers in Illinois who also serve as title insurance agents to 'choose which hat they will wear' in a home sale transaction, in a bid to reduce the typical closing costs paid by Illinois homeowners, and bring those costs more in line with the national average. But the proposal has drawn fire from lawyers and their associations, accusing supporters of the bill of unfairly 'scapegoating' lawyers for Illinois' relatively more expensive title insurance costs.

In the wake of the U.S Supreme Court’s landmark decision to declare unconstitutional forced union fees, the legal and political landscape will undoubtedly change. But precisely what will change, and how and when those changes will roll out, remains anybody’s guess.

Compelling non-union government workers to pay so-called “fair share fees” to unions they do not wish to join violates the First Amendment speech rights of non-union workers and is unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, finding in favor of an Illinois state worker who had sued to end the fees, also known as agency fees, in Illinois and across the country.

A federal appeals panel in Chicago has agreed industrial seals and couplings maker John Crane Inc. should be afforded the chance to air its claims two law firms allegedly engaged in racketeering and fraud in the way they pressed asbestos-related personal injury claims against the company in the past. However, the judges also agreed with lower court judges that Chicago federal court is not the right place for John Crane can pursue its claims.

A Cook County judge could soon weigh in on a legal fight between Illinois’ largest association of lawyers and a state regulatory agency, over the question of whether that state agency has the authority to effectively bar Illinois property tax lawyers from offering estimates of a property’s value when representing property owners before a state or county property tax appeal board.

While the U.S. Supreme Court's Bristol Myers Squibb ruling has resulted in some big wins for businesses targeted by the plaintiffs' bar, new strategies and theories deployed by plaintiffs' lawyers may be blunting the further impact of that decision, despite high hopes from some it would largely thwart the ability of out-of-state plaintiffs to sue out-of-state defendants in a favorable court forum.

After nearly three decades on Illinois’ high court, Justice Charles Freeman, the first black justice to serve on the Illinois Supreme Court and a former chief justice of the court, has retired. Illinois First District Appellate Court P. Scott Neville has been appointed to serve the remainder of Freeman's term through 2020.

Illinois voters will not get a chance to weigh in on the question of whether Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and other legislative leaders in the Democratic-controlled Illinois General Assembly should continue to hold the keys to drawing the state's legislative district maps, after the leaders of the state House and Senate refused to call a vote for a constitutional amendment designed to curtail their influence over the process.

Saying state law designates Chicago’s red light and speed camera enforcement programs as something different from ordinary traffic laws, a state appeals court has again handed a defeat to a class action attempting to overthrow the city’s automated traffic citation program, which annually adds millions of dollars in fines from ticketed motorists to the city’s coffers.

A former candidate who is suing Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan and some of his supporters for allegedly using political tricks to sabotage his campaign, is now locked in a fight in Chicago federal court to secure the release of a 2014 inspector general’s report his lawyer says is needed to shed light on how the longest serving state house speaker in U.S. history and his political organization work, to help substantiate the candidate’s claims.